Word: prose
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While the meeting yielded up no declarations that will be remembered for their ringing prose, it did produce two carefully wrought but unusually direct communiques, one condemning state-sponsored terrorism, another supporting a plan to stabilize currency-rate fluctuations. The statements represented personal victories for two members of the Reagan Cabinet. Secretary of State George Shultz has waged a long and sometimes lonely struggle to develop a consensus in the U.S. and among America's allies on the need to strike back against states that sponsor terrorism; Tripoli and Tokyo are proof that he has succeeded. Treasury Secretary James Baker...
There are comments Green could add ("Your overweening self-pity. Your penchant for purple prose"). When Pierce flies back to New York for a Christmas visit with his family, he is secretly affronted by their pride in him: "I had been waiting all my life for a moment I realized now would never come--the time it would be my turn to be seen as I truly was." He glances at the holiday turkey, "which was draped in a butter-soaked dish towel and sat on the oven rack like a Latin American dictator in a sauna...
...saddle atomic energy, the Rocky-like prizefight that pits Pena against a younger opponent, an eerie trip with a radioactive cargo, and a climactic battle to the death next to the Bomb in the last minutes before the blast. Smith is also capable of subtler effects. His spare prose shapes images that contain haunting affinities: wild horses and Army jeeps; rattlesnakes and coils of electrical cable; the lustrous surfaces of ceremonial pottery and the polished plutonium core of the atom bomb...
Muffled lives explode in such understatements. Jhabvala adopts the identities of characters from an alien culture without romanticizing or condescending. Her spare prose leaves little room for metaphor; her India emerges out of small specifics, accretions that summon up heat, hope, squalor and a vast expanse of sky. These stories do not demystify India; they pay the place tributes of empathy and grace...
...doomed forever to the same fantastic subject matter, as it is essentially an unrealistic form. Life is never as well designed as in the comics, the shadows never fall in the right place for dramatic effect, and you never have the chance to narrate your own exploits in polished prose...